Thank you Chris for your proposal to develop an other portable version (winPenPack already proposed one a few months ago).
winPenPack only made their package and told people about it; we'd like to work with you on it and make it an officially supported Sweet Home 3D build if possible.
I don't mind that you offer some additional furniture or plug-in files with your version, and I might do that too one day in Sweet Home 3D. After all, the license of these files let us distribute them along with Sweet Home 3D so it's not a problem. For your information, I even asked by kindness to Scopia and Kator Legaz if I could distribute their models with Sweet Home 3D, and they agreed.
I did take particular care when setting those up; the installers of each of them contain the license agreement as part of the installer.
You should also know that the next version 3.0 will include the features of the Advanced Rendering Plug-in, so I don't know if it will be a good idea to keep that plug-in once this version will be released.
Sounds good. It's easy to dump the plug-in once 3.0 is finalised (and the 3.0 installer can then clear out the old version of the plug-in from the user data).
You couldn't notice the trademark at first, since I registered it in May 2009, the same month as the one you started to support Sweet Home 3D (from the dates on portableapps.com site). 
Ah, I see. But still, I should have noticed it at some earlier point...
I give you the permission to redistribute Sweet Home 3D if you:
- copy or move the license information buried in the App/SweetHome3D directory to the root,
- copy or move the license information buried in the App/SweetHome3D directory to the root,
I didn't put the GPL in as part of the installer, because it's not necessary for the user to agree to it (or even for the user to see it). If you want to make sure people see that it's GPL, I think the best way would be to attach it as the EULA in the installer. That's very easy to do and well-supported. Most of our users won't ever browse to the folder but will just use the app straight from the PortableApps.com Platform.
- add to the root the 3D licenses bound to the additional 3D models you included (Free Art License for the contributed models, Creative Commons 3.0 Unported license for Scopia models and Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution 3.0 United States license for Kator Legaz models),
As mentioned above, the plug-in installers include the license is part of the installation process. I think that satisfies what you're wanting?
- display clearly a link to the source code and the license of your tool (you claim PortableApps.com provides a truly open platform on PortableApps.com home page but found no link to the source code or to the license of your tool), and a link to the source code under GNU GPL that will help users build the version you distribute (for those who don't know about it, I simply recall to Chris the terms of the GNU General Public License under which Sweet Home 3D is distributed),
The launcher is the PortableApps.com Launcher; apps using the PortableApps.com Launcher have a note put on them in their main page, in the spot where source is mentioned, e.g. for PChat Portable. All our programs (including the Suite/Platform) have that section so the source code is easily available. Some sites make the source code a more visible download, but in our case it's not really applicable (running from source is rarely going to do anything), and also we're appealing to a very large audience of non-geeks. Making the source link not the most prevalent is thus a good thing for us - but it's still there if you're looking. For the apps in Beta Testing, it's generally a case of the source code to the launcher is included or it uses the PortableApps.com Launcher. That, perhaps, takes a bit of inside knowledge, but when it gets to being released officially, it's all formatted nicely.
- do not call it "Sweet Home 3D Portable". Current version of Sweet Home 3D is named "Sweet Home 3D", and as the owner of the trademark I prefer at this time to forbid the creation of any name derived from "Sweet Home 3D".
Sorry if it seems severe, but I will never forget the stupid idea of Sun Microsystems, the inventor of Java, who let Netscape use JavaScript name in the 90's (almost all people who don't program still believe Java and JavaScript are the same thing or something very similar!), and you should also know that a portable version is in the works for Sweet Home 3D itself for a long time already (see Sweet Home 3D roadmap or this request).
I hope you'll understand my point of view.
Sorry if it seems severe, but I will never forget the stupid idea of Sun Microsystems, the inventor of Java, who let Netscape use JavaScript name in the 90's (almost all people who don't program still believe Java and JavaScript are the same thing or something very similar!), and you should also know that a portable version is in the works for Sweet Home 3D itself for a long time already (see Sweet Home 3D roadmap or this request).
I hope you'll understand my point of view.
Your splash screen looks nice but as a conclusion of the previous point, you'll guess that I don't want "Portable" word below "Sweet Home 3D" on the splash screen. I don't mind the USB key and prefer you write "PortableApps.com & SweetHome3D.com" at the bottom, even if I won't add your distribution on SourceForge.net (there's already many files to manage at each release!).
We'd like this to be as official as possible with you; our standard naming convention would have "Sweet Home 3D Portable" or "Sweet Home 3D, Portable Edition" - perhaps that second one appeals more?
On the topic of releasing, we're quite happy to do the work of making and releasing the portable edition and sending it to you for approval if you wish and linking from this site as an official download if you wish (as we've done with other projects like Inkscape). You'll also find that having a portable version at PortableApps.com will increase awareness and usage of Sweet Home 3D very significantly - we have millions of users and a very well-frequented site - in the top 7,000 by the Alexa rank.
By the way, as a Java guy, I'm always astonished how the meaning of portability evolved in Windows user's mind.
Personally, a portable application should run on any computer with any operating system, and that's I want to achieve with the implementation of portability I'll program...
Personally, a portable application should run on any computer with any operating system, and that's I want to achieve with the implementation of portability I'll program...
I guessed you were a Java guy by your projects. I'm a Python guy; ao much nicer than Java
. However, having been stuck on Windows generally in the past, I quite understand the need for our type of portability - which is why I became involved with PortableApps.com.Our type of portability is meaning that it can easily be run from Windows machines (which, you will admit, is a large percentage of computers), and keep all settings. Currently Sweet Home 3D is not portable in that it uses java.util.prefs, so settings go in the registry on Windows, and the furniture library will go in APPDATA. If you were wanting to make it easy to have an app which would fit our description of portability, cross-platform portable as well, there'd need to be some path configuration file, and not use java.util.prefs but instead a consistent method.
Portability of settings etc. across different platforms is something that we have in our long-term plans. But in a case like this, it'd actually require a fair bit of work, because the registry file format would need to be rewritten to the Linux file format for java.util.prefs, or the OS X file format, etc. It's not at all impossible though. If you'd like, I can play with including a shell file (or Python script, the settings conversion would be very difficult in sh) in the root to provide a launcher for Linux if you like, and see if I can get some help with finding out precisely how it works on the OS X side (not having a Mac).
